So that is where the idea for this list came from. Since I couldn't decide on the best games and felt I couldn't make a truly objective bad games list due to my enjoyment of them, I instead settled on making a list of some games that are so uninteresting, so absolutely dull that you can't possibly eke any sort of enjoyment out of them, whether it be genuine or ironic. Yahtzee recently made a similar list of blandest games in his web show, and although it certainly inspired the use of the word Blandest, the idea was already thought up before the synchronicity was noticed.
These are the games I may one day beat, but I probably won't enjoy doing so. These are the games that are so average they won't harm you to play, but won't entertain you either. Many of these games I never got too far in, but a game should not rely on your goodwill to play it far enough in to hopefully find what might be a good part. A painfully boring start rarely makes a possibly good end worth reaching. Although some day I may do something grander with my game collection, for now, allow me to share with you the 13 games that just aren't worth anyone's time or money.
And here.... we go!
13: Magical StarsignSystem: Nintendo DS
Genre: JRPG
The first game on this list holds a special place in my heart as being the first game to truly break my trust in Nintendo. For a long time, simply being published by Nintendo meant, in my eyes, that the game was guaranteed to be of a certain level of quality, and even now I usually trust them more as a publisher than other companies. However, this bog-standard DS JRPG took that trust and tainted it forever.
To be honest, Magical Starsign is not an entirely offensive game, although the art style is rather ugly in certain parts (just look at those two main characters on the boxart and their weird abs and faces), and of all the games that made it on this list, I am most willing to believe this game may "get better" somewhere down the road, but Magical Starsign makes a terrible mistake early on: for the tutorial it gives you all the characters and abilities that it will soon strip away and slowly give back to you over the course of the game. Not only is this bad form for a tutorial, as gameplay elements should be taught when relevant instead of hoping you remember them when they come up down the road, but it also makes the early game feel too simple while at once having a weird undercurrent of needless complexity. Games like Star Ocean: The First Departure can blindside you with too much info early on that makes it hard to figure it out later when its actually usable, but Magical Starsign dumps it on your head and then removes it, which can work in simple platformers or metroidvanias, but in a JRPG it just makes the already monotonous battle system feel even worse when you are constantly working with so much less than you were given to see at the start.
All in all though, it really is just a bog-standard JRPG whose few innovations are just not interesting enough to save it. And that isn't even me dissing basic JRPG gameplay, as I was delighted to find Glory of Heracles is a great yet simple handheld JRPG. However, in Magical Starsign, a giant scorpion boss early on can be trounced no sweat with basic attacks, making both the boss and your extra abilities seem underwhelming. I played a bit into the game, enough to realize how slowly I'd be getting my party back. One day I may just force myself to beat it, but as it stands, its just an RPG with an uninteresting story and gameplay. Maybe it was meant for a younger audience based on the art style and all, but there are already so many better RPGs for children that don't have weird mechanics based on how the planets are aligned.
Fun Fact: Magical Starsign became a personal nickname of mine for a move Algol uses in Soul Calibur 4 and onward. He has a move that causes him to float up into the air with his arms crossed and briefly blink out of existence. I have tried many times to find out what the move is useful for and turned up nothing, so I one day called the move "Magical Starsign", as I felt it was something that looked promising and I had the right to believe would be good, but I just could not find anything appealing about it.
Don't let Mokka's awesome design fool you: this game ain't worth your time. In fact, many other characters have pretty decent designs. But they're in a game that really doesn't deserve them.
12: Pac-Man WorldSystem: Playstation
Genre: 3-D Platformer
There's a soft spot in my heart for the old retro icons who have never successfully made the jump away from the initial game that made them famous. Pretty much any Frogger game besides the original is hilarious in its attempts to turn a frog crossing the road into an adventure hero, and ol' Pac-Man here has also struggled to make his mark anywhere but a maze. Certainly, many of Pac-Man's games could probably make a worst games list, with the infamous Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures being a definite candidate, but even that game has hilarious moments like Pac-Man seemingly drunk on milk. You may have to guide him around like a mix between a Lemming and a Sim in that game, but at least it was bad enough to be interesting.
Pac-Man World however came with the promise that it wasn't all that bad. Supposedly it was a decent jump for the yellow pellet muncher into 3D.
It's not.
In fact, despite the genre being a 3-D platformer, I feel like Pac-Man World embodies the idea behind a 2.5D game better than supposed genre members like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. In that Kirby game, the models and world are 3-D but your movement is restricted to a 2D plane. In Pac-Man World however, the platformer is still from left to right, but you can move into and out of the background, not that its every really populated with much interesting for you to interact with and more often than not just makes you miss jumps or hit obstacles because of the need to align yourself properly in the flat 3D plane.
Pac-Man World really does play like a 2D platformer for the most part, with interspersed maze sections because it's Pac-Man. There are a wide selection of collectibles that make the already hard-to-enjoy game more tiresome if you wish to collect them, leading to backtracking and mucking about for rewards that just can't be worth it.
Perhaps the sequels were better as I've seen they actually become proper 3D platformers, but Pac-Man World, the original, is just another failed attempt by Pac-Man to find a hold outside of gobbling dots in mazes.
11: Conker's Pocket TalesSystem: Game Boy/ Game Boy Color
Genre: Top-Down Adventure
Many a year ago, I managed to find a playable demo on a Gameboy at I think Toys R' Us that had Conker's Pocket Tales. I wandered around a bit near the starting house, did nothing of note, and left with no true impression of the game.
If only I had stuck around long enough to realize how average this game is.
Flash forward at least a decade to a time near the present, where I became interested in a podcast called The Kongversation, where two enthusiastic and funny guys talk about games starring Donkey Kong or the closely associated cast of Rare characters like Conker and Banjo. I quite enjoy listening to it as I work or play games, and every now and again they do episode spotlights on certain games. One episode was for this game: Conker's Pocket Tales, one I had heard them praise in other episodes, so my curiosity grew and I decided to buy it so I can play it and then listen to the episode afterwards.
After playing it for a while, I'm not sure when I might listen to that episode, as completing the game seems like it will be a slog. If you ever wondered if Conker's turn towards the more irreverent and foul-mouthed Conker's Bad Fur Day was a good decision, this game should convince you that it was the only hope for this series. I have my own issues with Conker's Bad Fur Day of course, but its humor and over-the-top offensiveness make it an enjoyable game, certainly after your run-in with the Great Mighty Poo.
Conker's Pocket Tales, meanwhile, had the canned Twelve Tales been made as a follow-up with similar gameplay and sensibilities, would have likely marred the company's reputation long before the buyout by Microsoft. This Game Boy title thankfully fell off the radar of enough people for Banjo and DK to carry the Rare name to greatness.
Now then, the game itself: It's like a really crappy Link's Awakening. You wander around collecting gifts that were stolen from your birthday party by Evil Acorn, who also kidnapped your girlfriend. Current Rare employees seem to have no memory of this game, and that's no surprise as nothing really stands out about it. Fighting anything in the game is a drag, as you rely on a slingshot with limited ammo to do the deed and the enemies aren't challenging, only really good at being in the way. You also have a ground pound, but it only works as a finishing move as you'll be hurt if you use it on something that survives and isn't a wind-up mouse. The puzzles are standard "push box on switch" affairs, and every now and again there is a boss or a basic shooting minigame.
Rare has a reputation for doing a genre Nintendo has done but better: Donkey Kong Country is the better Super Mario Bros, Banjo-Kazooie the better Mario 64, Conker's Pocket Tales... it's like an early Zelda game without any of the interesting elements.
10: SimCity 2000System: Game Boy Advance
Genre: City Builder
The only game on this list simply for being a bad port, for it manages to suck all the fun out of a rather great series.
My love for SimCity came from the original on SNES, and its still my go-to city builder of choice as I play it on Wii's Virtual Console every now and again. I know there are better ones out there, and for a long time I played the disc version of the PC's SimCity 3000, although the disc itself and a computer with a suitable disc drive have yet to reunite in recent times. The SNES one stands as my lasting favorite though, but after playing both the SNES one and the PC's SimCity 3000, I wanted a city builder I could play on the go, and that's why I picked up SimCity 2000... and later sold it because I didn't like it at all.
The core gameplay is simple enough: build a city, watch it grow, deal with its problems and demands in an attempt to make it successful. It's actually a pretty good genre for a mobile system, as you can pick it up, change a few things, and not worry about having to stop the game to do something as it can save anytime and there is no true stopping point like a game with levels would have.
Sadly, this GBA port of SimCity 2000 makes compromises that hurt the game's overall feel. The small screen means you can't really get a great view of your city at large or even a decent sized area for operating in. Plumbing is entirely absent as a system, and while it's a bit more of a nuisance in city builders than something interesting, its absence can't help but be felt. Disasters are anemic affairs, and the screen is cluttered with your tools, making your beautiful city even more difficult to see behind it all. Sandwiched between the simplicity of the SNES original and the juggernaut that was the PC's 3000, 2000 felt like it was missing too much from both without contributing anything to justify its existence. Maybe the DS SimCity games were better, but 2000 made me mistrust the genre on handhelds, and at this point in time, there is literally no reason to go back to it, as modern city builders have more going for them and older ones can scratch your itch if you crave simplicity... or Bowser stomping on your city.
9: The UnderGardenSystem: Steam
Genre: Casual Puzzle Game
That guy's pretty cute looking there. In game though, you start off with an ugly/cute bluish creature that certainly won't endear itself to you as you try and drag it through a supposedly "zen" game.
Before making this list, I made sure to give this a second go, as my initial experience with it made me so tired from the uninteresting gameplay I quit before finishing the first level. Well, I went in and beat the first level, and left with a headache for my troubles.
UnderGarden is a simplistic puzzle game where you float around a world collecting pollen to make plants grow back, occasionally solving puzzles with the fruit they grow while dragging around little dudes with instruments sometimes. The little dudes with instruments are the highlight of the game, as they are cute and have decent beats to share, but dragging them around is a chore and seemingly pretty useless. To be fair, doing anything is a chore, as the game relies solely on your mouse for movement. You hold down left click to move in a direction and it feels sluggish and awful no matter how you do it. Almost all the puzzles are finicky and the physics feel inconsistent and strange. Regrowing the plants is tedious and unrewarding as they are almost all generic stalks that don't even manage to be pretty, although the game thinks they are. There's another game on Steam called CreaVures that makes up for its basic but good enough gameplay with a beautiful aesthetic, but UnderGarden's aesthetic is lifeless even when you're literally putting life back into the world. Growing plants is an easy way to inject beauty, and yet it fails here.
Now, the bad gameplay tries to hide behind one strong claim from the developers: it's a Zen game. You're not supposed to play it like a normal game, its supposed to be enjoyed slowly and casually. Well... even that kind of game needs to engage you in some way. Growing the plants is boring as you keep needing to refill on pollen and the plants are nearly everywhere and require you to rub and refill over and over before doing anything of note if you want to 100% a level. Even if you ignore it, the gameplay just isn't relaxing at all. There are some good games like Zen Puzzle Garden and Zen Bound 2 that claim to be Zen but are a bit too frustrating at times to fit, but they are still good games so it's okay. If you really want a Zen game, I might recommend Woodle Tree Adventures for its simple gameplay, although some glitches and the occasional frustration crop up, its mostly a bit of mindless platforming fun with a cute aesthetic (although one achievement requires a glitch exploit to avoid being a boring grindfest). Even games like Sonic Labyrinth would make a better Zen game than UnderGarden, as they are still games that have gameplay and goals, even though you can zone out and play them easily enough due to their simplicity.
UnderGarden was apparently published by Atari, which in its current dark ages is no surprise. Really, this quote from the Wikipedia page says what I'm trying to say rather nicely: "msxbox-world.com described it as " [feeling] like an artsy game made by a bunch of businessmen, rather than an artist". It's got nothing to make it stand out but it hits all the marks it needs to in order to look Indie. I actually watched a video of it before buying where the guy playing it said I probably wouldn't enjoy it. I am sorry for doubting you sir.
8: Dungeon Hunter: Alliance
System: Playstation 3
Genre: Diablo-style Hack-and-Slash RPG
They say any game can be fun if you play it with friends.
Dungeon Hunter: Alliance proves that isn't true.
My brother, my long time friend Ven and I will often meet up and play video games, but there was a bit of a drought in new games to play at one point and it seemingly fell on me to track some down to inject a little variety and novelty in the game lineup we played. I browsed a few websites looking for fun multiplayer games and we ended up playing two of the games that seemingly came highly recommended: one was Castle Crashers, a game that my brother didn't enjoy but me and Ven were able to enjoy when we later played it two-player. The other... was Dungeon Hunter: Alliance.
There was a time I thought Diablo-style RPGs weren't for me, but much like Smite dispelled the idea that I would never like MOBAs and Civilization V made me realize I could like 4X strategy games... I thankfully found the game Torchlight before playing this game that embodies the issues I have with Diablo-clones. Loot-focused gameplay may work in single-player games, or even games with online co-op, but Dungeon Hunter: Alliance provides new and better loot so rapidly that the hack-and-slash battles must frequently be put on hold as obtuse menus are opened, covering huge swathes of the screen, to update to the latest gear.
Our gaming group made a valiant effort to persist despite the loot menus, with my brother as the warrior, me as mage, and Ven on the rogue... until everyone realized that long-range bow attacks were better in every situation seemingly and gameplay devolved into standing far away and picking off bad guys with little in the way of action. For a time I even specifically avoided praising my bow, as I was the first to pick it up as my attack of choice, as I feared that would happen if the others found out how good it was.
Efforts were made to keep things from going stale, and there are a few jokes we extracted from playing it (like everyone trying to shaft me with Muslin equipment long after it stopped being useful), but the core gameplay was broken over our knees by the Bow Party and the story certainly wasn't keeping us around. Single-player does not sound promising either, as you'd have no one to talk with and you'd instead have those lonesome loot menus and bow battles to yourself.
Dungeon Hunter: Alliance is probably the first of these bland games that I would consider a bad game for being so bland. Conker, Magical Starsign... heck, even UnderGarden might be tolerated or have room for improvement later in the game. But now... we've entered the lower echelons of mediocrity.
7: Surgeon Simulator 2013System: Steam
Genre: Obtuse-Controls "Simulator"
In what I imagine might be my most controversial inclusion on this list, I feel Surgeon Simulator isn't really a game to be played so much as watched on Youtube as humorous Let's Players struggle with the controls. Games like this, Octodad, and QWOP are all part of a new breed of game where the controls are made obtuse on purpose and serve as the main challenge of the game rather than the task at hand. The thing is, Octodad and QWOP both offer far more tangible goals, and QWOP is short enough to be enjoyable while Octodad is certainly more palatable control-wise than Surgeon Simulator. Games like Goat Simulator rely on wacky physics to make humorous situations for the player to experience, but most of Surgeon Simulator's humor comes from the concept rather than the execution.
The goal of a round of Surgeon Simulator is to complete a simplified operation even though your individual fingers are all mapped to different keys. Your wrist is also independently controlled, and there are many tools to knock around beside the operating table. There is no real penalty for messing around unless you really go to far... but messing around really doesn't offer much. Even cracking open a skull with a hammer feels rather underwhelming thanks to the plain animation and lack of true reaction from the gaming world. That's why I recommend it more as a game to watch others play, as they can react and actually give you something worth watching, whereas the gameplay is too basic if you work out the complexities, which really isn't hard compared to games like QWOP. If you have to force yourself to perform poorly to extract fun, then you have discovered a special style of denial.
The game can also be pegged for starting the trend of ironic simulator games or other Obtuse-Control games like Ampu-Tea which deviate completely into the territory of being bad, as the joke of Surgeon Simulator is that its something incredibly complex turned into a goofy physics toybox. I think that's the real issue after all: it's a physics toybox more than anything, and while similar toyboxes like Windosill avoided this list for being honest about that quality and very short, Surgeon Simulator 2013 became a phenomenon thanks to Youtube, while the game itself is rather uninteresting to play, as even the "frustration gaming" side of it doesn't hold much water as the goal is arbitrary and the operation easily repeatable and short. I really wanted to enjoy this one, and they've added updates to up the variety, but its basically just paint jobs for an experience that can't really be enjoyed solo.
System: PC CD-ROM
Genre: Platformer
Bless my older sister's heart for noticing my interest in video games and trying to buy me one as a gift. Sadly, her good intentions fell short as she had no idea how to find out which games are good and she likely was tricked by a cover that looks much more interesting than anything the game has to offer.
Despite the anime-inspired appearance of our protagonist Akimbo on the cover here, Akimbo and every other living thing in this game take the form of lumpy models as 3D was becoming the hip thing in PC gaming. Akimbo and the 3D models bounce around 2D environments in a very poor and needlessly difficult platformer that really is as hard as it is because of the poor controls and the sorry excuse for Kung-Fu on display. Akimbo's attacks have no range to them and little satisfying substance, so most enemies are best off ignored and hopped over. The platforming is nothing new, with generic collectibles floating around and rather plain level design.
Akimbo is the embodiment of the cliché 2D Platformer, and even though it gives you punches and kicks instead of Goomba stomps to take on enemies, it couldn't better embody the sorry state of the genre back before it fell out of vogue.
Akimbo has also made me hesitant to buy the highly praised but very similar in appearance platformer Tomba! on the PSN, although the lackluster trailer did it no favors as well. But that is how deeply Akimbo burned me: it makes me mistrust other games that bear even a passing resemblance to it.
I almost can't think of anything else to say about it. It does nothing unique, it takes no risks, its core selling point (the Kung-Fu) has less depth than the NES Kung-Fu from years earlier, and I almost think that quote on the case must be IGN having a quote removed from context. It's a Frankenstein of all the most basic components needed to be a platformer. I certainly do not bemoan the fact that my laptop's CD drive does not work, as I'm missing nothing by not being able to play Akimbo, who as far as I know, never truly stands akimbo. I don't even recall him using that sword but he must get it at some point. I mostly just remember being killed by clams with googly eyes.
System: Wii U Virtual Console (originally NES)
Genre: Light Gun Shooter
No one ever made it a rule that video games needed to be timeless, but Duck Hunt would certainly break that rule if it did exist. One of the earliest Light Gun games and certainly the most popular, Duck Hunt has not stood the test of time, and I am quite happy it was my brother who bought when it came to the Wii U Virtual Console instead of me, as I barely got an hour or two of out this dated shooting game.
I can certainly believe it was something in its time, but unlike Pong which can still be enjoyed for its simplicity, Duck Hunt almost feels too simple. Game A (and may I say I dislike games having a Game A and Game B be titled that way if they are completely different, most likely due to a mistrust built up from games that have Game A and Game B as tiny variations on one game instead of separate game types) is the well known Duck Hunt mode, where a bunch of Ducks fly out of the bushes and you shoot them down. Thing is... it really isn't that difficult. The ducks fly out in rather simple and predictable patterns, and it requires much less precision to peg them than most light gun games. Of course, as time goes on, the Ducks get harder to shoot as they fly faster, but the difficulty progression is just slow enough that by the time you're missing ducks, you're doing so more out of boredom than out of the climbing difficulty. The Game Over and laughing dog are quite welcome after trying to pay attention to the game long enough to succeed.
Game B at least seems to be more of a challenge even before the difficulty hike. Clay Pigeons are shot out and you must shoot them down, and their size scales as they fly further away from you, meaning even the easy ones must be shot early so they don't become more difficult to peg. Still, much like the ducks, they never really do much besides get thrown out to be shot in predictable paths and patterns.
It seems a bit rude to pick on the grandfather of Light Gun games, but without nostalgia to prop up Duck Hunt, most people will find it to be a rather plain experience. Even simple hunting games, like the arcade cabinets you find at Chuck E. Cheese where they give you five bullets to shoot 3 bucks, are far more interesting. Shots are strategic there (at least theoretically) and the shots more satisfying. By the end of your first round through of duck shooting though, its hard to wring any fun from the remaining waves of ducks before you cave-in and let yourself lose or simply lose when the ducks get too fast to track. Although I'm sure you could track them if you wanted to, it's just nearly impossible to care by that point.
Duck Hunt by this point is a fossil: it's valuable in that it provides knowledge of our past, but it can't do much else besides that.
System: DSi
Genre: Camera-Based Minigames
The DSi created quite a splash when it was given built-in cameras and the ability to download virtual titles, and to introduced the DSiware to the world, Nintendo created a few simple games to test the waters. Birds and Beans was pulled out of the WarioWare games, and although it was an orphaned minigame, it was still enjoyable enough. WarioWare's larger minigames were a decent fit for cheap downloadable titles (although these days charging 2 bucks for a game like Birds and Beans would cause tons of internet whining). The other game Nintendo released though was WarioWare: Snapped! Wow! A whole new WarioWare game! Sure it's five bucks, so it won't be as big as the others, but it'll still be fun, right?
Unfortunately, the camera gimmick used in all the games is a complete disaster. The DSi camera is decent enough for taking pictures (they weren't the best quality but were okay for the time), but relying on the camera for motion games was a terrible, terrible decision. When even the Kinect couldn't handle it years later with better equipment, the DSi camera was doomed to fail as a motion-detecting device. Not to mention that the DSi camera had a weird habit of turning you into a shadow man no matter how bright it was.
Anyway, Snapped! asks you to place your DSi on a table or something and stand far away enough so your hands and face are visible, so already you are far from a tiny screen trying to play minigames with a body you can barely see. Bizarrely, there is a subset of games (1/4 of the total amount on offer!) that can only be played with two people, further stretching the capabilities of a camera that was already not up to snuff.
The games run the gambit of so easy you can basically make any motion to win to impossible thanks to the camera's poor detection of your body. The microgames will grind to a halt if it's not detecting you right, so the frantic and speedy nature of WarioWare is ruined when you try to win a game quickly only for the DSi to fail to register your waving hand as a waving hand. There are 20 or so microgames total and although you may find a decent one every now and again, you can only play them in five game chunks.
Nintendo was too new to DSiware and WarioWare did the best it could with the limitations of the new frontier and the new tech, but it was doomed before it left the starting gate thanks to the poor design decision of trying to use a DSi camera like the Playstation Eye.
System: Playstation 2
Genre: Pinball
Picking on a Pinball game may seem like me choosing an easy target, but I'm actually a big fan of virtual pinball. Pokemon Pinball, Sonic Spinball, and Pinball FX2 (which uses somewhat realistic Pinball tables) are all games I've enjoyed, and while games like Mario Pinball Land were underwhelming, they were still fun at times. Having played a variety of Pinball games as well as a couple real Pinball tables, I felt buying a game that took classic Pinball tables and digitized them wouldn't be a bad idea. The Gottlieb Collection and the as-of-yet-never-owned Williams Collection both spoke to me, and Gottlieb was the one I got first... and the one that made me not want to pursue the Williams Collection.
The pinball mechanics work fine and everything, but the collection of tables available are so uninspired or strangely complex that none of them make me wish to continue playing them. The only one with any hope is Tee'd Off, a simple golf themed table with groundhogs and a refreshing simplicity compared to some of the other tables that have multiple table layers or some other alienating premise.
A lot of real world Pinball tables use a franchise to draw eyes and players, so these unaffiliated ones must have felt the need to really innovate to grab the attention of flighty pinball players, but the strange gimmicks coupled with unrewarding gameplay makes me want to pass them all by in this virtual arcade. You'd think it would be easy to make the pinball satisfying with some bright flashing lights and loud noises, but it's too busy trying to push the core gimmick to allow itself to be fun or interesting.
The pinball collection offers nothing that I wouldn't rather get from a physical pinball table or a better executed fictional one. I imagine this is supposed to be a bit of a nostalgia hook for Pinball Wizards, but this collection holds no magic for anyone who just wants a set of tables for some relaxing and enjoyable virtual pinball.
2: Dear Esther
System: Steam
Genre: Walking Simulator/Art Game
Welcome to the bottom of the barrel, where only two completely bland games remain, one of which is offensive in claiming itself to be art when the game has barely substance to it at all.
Although I do not like the negative connotation of the term "Walking Simulator" and how liberally the term is applied these days, that is really all there is to Dear Esther. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a beautiful game with a compelling story, and I enjoyed games like Gone Home that often get the name "Walking Simulator" tacked onto them, and although I'm not really a fan of the "find the note" gameplay of Gone Home and its kin, it certainly beats the do-nothing gameplay of Dear Esther. Dear Esther is technically an art game, which supposedly absolves it of all criticism when really, if it truly was an art game, then discussion and criticism should be done more heavily of it than a standard video game.
Dear Esther's gameplay consists of walking around an island and gradually being told a story as you progress. However, these story tidbits are randomly selected and it can take up to four playthroughs to even get the complete story, whereas one is more than enough for anyone and the story doesn't really get more fleshed out than a generic one you'd know the important details of regardless of which ones you randomly get. Dear Esther is about a man whose wife died in a car crash. There, that is the bulk of the story. Of course he's sad about it, but there's not much done with the story or setup and it carries about the standard emotional weight you'd expect from that without any substance to back it up. The island the game takes place on is good looking when not under close scrutiny, where you'll realize the grass and mushrooms are just a bunch of 2-d sprites. For a world you'll be looking at the whole time with no interaction of any sort, you'd think they'd make that less obvious.
You move through some rather uninteresting locations, told a standard story, and then it ends predictably. There are some setpieces, and the beach full of shipwrecks, perhaps the most interesting one, seems to have no purpose. Dear Esther probably gets more praise then it deserves for shaking the tree and making us look at what truly constitutes a game, but its got too many contemporaries these days who do its ideas better, with better stories, environments, and sometimes they even include gameplay!
I try not to use the word pretentious lightly, but Dear Esther pretty much embodies it. It takes you for granted and gives you very little for giving it the benefit of the doubt. There are very few games I want to hate, and I hoped that Dear Esther wouldn't be a bad game when I played it, but it really did nothing to try and earn my favor.
Art is subjective, but bad art and good art can both elicit reactions from people who see it. Dear Esther just doesn't really have anything interesting to evoke reactions from anyone. Is there anything worse than mediocre art?
Before we continue on to number one, I felt this would be a good place to share some...
DISHONORABLE MENTIONS
Here I'm going to list really quickly some games that were uniquely bland without being offensively so. Perhaps they didn't meet expectations or simply failed to be boring enough to earn a spot on the list, but very briefly, here are the games that were kinda bland, but not really that bad.
System: Game Boy
Genre: Platformer
I'm a big fan of the Wario platformers and have been one since I played the excellent Wario Land 4, and while some games have difficulty in being memorable experiences despite being fun (Wario: Master of Disguise and Wario Land: Shake It! deserving special mention despite their steps to avoid it), going back to play Wario's first solo game made me realize how lucky we are to have gotten it as a full series. Wario Land 1 plays like what a modern bad licensed platformer game might play like. The throwing mechanic is incredibly basic and not very interesting, and the hats are so vital to the gameplay that losing them means you might as well restart the level.
Still, Wario Land can be powered through and it isn't exactly bad in the end, just a bit generic and a poor start for a series that would prove its worth in the next installment.
System: Gamecube
Genre: JRPG
And I thought Surgeon Simulator would be my most controversial pick! Now, while most the games on this list I would argue are objectively bland, Tales of Symphonia feels more like its just personally bland to me. Symphonia had a lot of things going for it to make it sell well and become a classic, being a JRPG on a system that desperately needed them. It's only contemporaries really were the atypical and quirky Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and the criminally overlooked Skies of Arcadia Legends. Not to mention it had co-op, which is a major selling point on a Nintendo console.
However, much of my problems with it are sort of echoes of my issues with Magical Starsign. It's a pretty standard RPG that does nothing to break the mold, doing things that were cliché and trite that even its progenitors had grown out of by this point. My brother and I could call plot points in advance like the fate of the old woman in the concentration camp, and whenever the plot need a push forward, the female lead Colette inexplicably tripped into progressing the plot, something that could barely work even in a parody plot. Not to mention the overarching plot was generic as all get out. The gameplay was passable, but the story made me mistrust the Tales of... series as whole. Perhaps it might be possible for me to like it if I went in with a different mindset, but as of now, it is just too bland for me. Looking up some reviews for it, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one to dislike the plot.
After all, Tales of Symphonia has had a sequel by now, of which I have not heard any sort of opinion on. I guess no one really wanted the story continued so much as the gameplay.
Most Any Winter Olympic GamePictured: Nagano Winter Olympics '98 (Nintendo 64) and Winter Olympic Games (Sega Genesis)
If this had been a Top 15 Blandest Video games list, these two Olympic games might have made the cut, but their placement in reference to each other would have been arbitrary and they are both really indicative of a bigger trend in gaming.
For the most part, save series like the Mario sports titles, you only ever really need a rather modern sports title to scratch your itch of a specific sport. If your Madden is recent enough, you don't really need to buy the newer ones. This sort of leaves us with a big bag of games made for the Winter Olympics, none of which are really worth owning. Even the Olympics knew its games were bad and trusted the brand recognition of Mario and Sonic to carry it in recent years, and the only reason those are any good really seems to be because of the dream events they include where they basically just make their own games up.
Meanwhile, realistic winter Olympic games are tasked with making a bunch of sports titles all in one game, reducing the love and care each might need to become excellent on their own, as its basically becomes a minigame collection but with decent sized sports games. So many winter events are similar as well, with skiing spanning multiple events, bobsled and luge being basically the same, and so many variations on ice skating that it's hard to remain interesting. And curling, which is its own problem. Then comes the gameplay, which no matter how hard one tries, the Ski Jump is almost always going to be rather bland.
Winter Olympic games are just tasked with adapting a bland property, as even the Winter Olympics are basically just the less popular Olympics. Almost every Olympic event people care about is in the Summer. Thing is, Winter Olympic games are simply not bland enough to be offensive, and sometimes one or two games squeeze out something interesting.
They certainly can't hold a candle to the most bland game in all of video game history...
System: Wii Virtual Console (originally NES)
Genre: Puzzle
Remember how I said this was the list of the Blandest games I've ever played, and not the worst? Well, what if a game is so unbelievably bland that it could even top any other bad game that dares challenge it?
Yoshi is a deceptive little creature, wearing the cute dinosaur as a mascot for an absolutely abysmal puzzle game. I have no true favorite genre of video game, but I sometimes say Puzzle as it is a genre I really do enjoy. Yoshi is the antithesis to enjoyable puzzle games. Yoshi is offensively bland, and even when it went on sale for around 30 cents on the Wii U Virtual Console, I warned my brother it wasn't worth that price. He didn't listen, and even he now agrees it wasn't worth it.
Yoshi is, indeed, technically a puzzle game. There are four lanes, and two enemies will fall in side-by-side pairs rather slowly to fill them. There are four enemy types so you can pretty much assign an enemy to a lane, and eggshells sometimes fall instead which you can use to sandwich all the enemies in a lane for a lot of points. In Game A, you play until you fill a lane too high, which is a nigh impossible feat if done on purpose. It's hard to do by not pressing anything. It's so easy to match enemies that there is no challenge in this mode, as you can go on forever without issue. The only thing to really mess you up is trying to get big stacks between eggshells for a lot of points, although its technically easier and smarter to earn those points through gradual matching.
Game B is slightly more of a game with a challenge. Now, rather than just getting points, the goal is to completely clear the playing field. There is likely some predetermined point where you are meant to have done it each level, as if you don't do so, you'll keep getting in situations where there is one enemy type left, and then the next piece that drops is that enemy type and a different one, and so on like that forever. This mode at least seems easier to fail at.
There is an argument to be made that this game is for kids, thus explaining its simplicity. I'm no fool, I know certain games are for certain demographics. I'm not going to put Bratz: Forever Diamonds, Barney's Hide & Seek or Donkey Kong Jr. Math on here. But Yoshi does not qualify as one of these. Young children will either be unable to do puzzle games like Yoshi at all or find the game too bland to play. Children need bombastic feedback from their games to keep playing, and Yoshi would be a terrible attention getter if young children were expected to play it. I'm sure there are modern young kids who can enjoy and play well enough iPhone puzzle games adults enjoy despite being technically in the demographic for playing Yoshi.
Yoshi is a boring game marketed towards an uninterested audience that lives on only because Nintendo plopped their cute dinosaur on the title.
Yoshi is both the Worst and the Blandest game I have ever played, and I doubt it will ever be topped.
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